 Hello everyone, how are you? Thank you all for coming. My name is Evan Bernstein. I'm the co-host of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe radio show and podcast. It is my distinct pleasure to be moderating this very special panel which is titled Skeptics in the Dojo taking on the martial arts. So why don't we get right to it. You know, I'll start with few opening remarks. We all know that the wonderful thing about skepticism is that it can be applied to just about any aspect of your life and the martial arts is certainly no exception to that. It's something that many people have had some sort of experience with either directly or indirectly. You've either taken classes yourself or your children have taken classes or you have another relative who is in the martial arts. I think everybody in this room understands what I'm saying. They have that sort of either first-hand experience or direct relationship with someone who has. When we put the martial arts through the filter of skepticism, what comes out on the other end is often surprising and sometimes ugly when it comes right down to it. But this should come as no surprise to I think the people in this room. While the amazing meeting has covered many topics over the past decade or so that these meetings have been happening, there has not been one that is really focused on the martial arts, but that is until today. Seated here before you are some very prominent skeptics, but what you probably may or may not know is that by my calculations, there's over 100 years of martial arts experience up on this stage right now. And it's a virtual treasure trove of first-hand accounts and expertise, the likes of which has not been gathered before a disceptic conference, at least not that I'm aware of. So by contrast, I myself have only been in the martial arts since 2008, so I'm really relatively new I think when it comes to this. But I wanted to give you just kind of a brief understanding of my experience, my brief experience in the martial arts. I train in a discipline called Krav Maga. Krav Maga is the official Israeli defense force, self-defense system. It's what the army teaches both their soldiers and the civilian population of Israel in order to defend themselves on the streets against attacks. It does not contain some of the things that you find in the more traditional martial arts. There are no katas. There are no forms. We don't have competitions. We don't write enter rings for sport. What it is, it is a pure fight for your life self-defense system. In other words, if somebody puts their hands on you in a violent way, Krav Maga is there to help you defend yourself against that. Or what happens if you're in a parking lot late at night and someone approaches you with a knife? Or what happens if you're in your home and there's a home invasion and somebody's got a gun and you've got loved ones in the other room or children upstairs asleep? How do you react to these situations? This is what Krav Maga teaches us how to deal with real life scenarios. It's an added bonus, I think, to realize that with Krav Maga, they've been able to change over the years. It's been around for about 80 years. But when new evidence comes along or when they realize that there's a better way of doing something, they adapt. They actually change their techniques in order to go with better techniques. They discard the old, what used to work, and go with what is now a better technique. And isn't that science? I mean, really, isn't that the heart of what science is about? I think what Carl Sagan once said? To be able to do away with your old beliefs and replace it with the new knowledge that we've learned. And that's exactly what I derive from Krav Maga. It's one of the reasons why I find it so appealing. I've been exposed to things in our studio, which I'm afraid to say have been less than scientific. I've seen the concept of chi brought up in our studio. And I've also been exposed to some nutritional claims and supplements and those sorts of things that have been on our shells. But I'm also pleased to say that in the light of real evidence of these things, my master instructor no longer uses or no longer relies on these things as part of his program. So I have to give kudos and props where props are due in this regard. So that's been my brief experience. But the people to my right here are the ones who are going to really elaborate for you much more than I can about the intersections of martial arts and skepticism. So please allow me a minute to introduce the panelists. First, directly to my right for 15 years, he was Scientific American's editor in chief. And in 2000, he was a recipient of the Sagan Award for the public understanding of science bestowed by the Council of Scientific Society presidents. He is the host of the Weather Channel's 2013 mini series, Hacking the Planet. And just one, it's just one of his many television credits. Please welcome John Rennie. And seated to John's right, he is the host of the Hayam martial arts podcast. That is a show dedicated to the promotion of skepticism and rational thinking in the martial arts, amongst many other things. He is a long, he is a lifelong practitioner of the Bagau and Ching Yi disciplines. Please welcome David Jones. To David's right, she is no stranger to Tam Goers. She is the author of popular science books for the public, including Me, Myself and Why, Searching for the Science of the Self, and the Calculus Diaries, How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas and Survive the Zombie Apocalypse. Those are all things we can relate to here right now. Her work has appeared in many magazines and newspapers. Her blog appears in at the Siam website. It's titled Cocktail Party Physics. Please welcome Jennifer Wieland. To Jennifer's right, he is a professional welterweight MMA fighter fighting in the Bellator MMA League. He is an active member of the skeptical community and proudly adorns the JREF logo on his fight shorts. He holds a record of 21 wins, eight losses and one draw. He stands at six feet, zero inches, weighing in at 170 pounds. Please welcome Brent Weidman. And finally, the next gentleman to his right is a protege of James Randy, an accomplished magician, a jazz musician, and he holds the title of Sipu, a title he earned from Grandmaster Chan who trained alongside Bruce Lee. He has been teaching Wing Chun Kung Fu in Honolulu since 1994. Please welcome SF Ziegler. And this is the point where I'm going to kind of let them take over. We're all going to have some comments to make along the way. But first up in round one is John Renny. Take it away, John. That's great. Well, thank you very much. I think I may need the changer there. Oh, yes. Thank you. Anyway, right. So you know, martial arts is is inspirational to a lot of different sorts of people and and very impressive. In many ways, as well, obviously, a lot of what impresses people who are in the martial arts, but maybe especially some of the ones who are outside of it is the power that they can sometimes associate with it. They can sometimes look at it and think, well, it seems like these people who have been training in the martial arts are doing some things that seem absolutely superhuman. And it's it's the scale of those kinds of techniques, particularly sometimes some of the power that's involved in them that that maybe has has helped to support in some people's minds the idea that there is some kind of mystical magical force that those years of training and you know, ancient Eastern arts has somehow brought you. This is not the case. However, what people don't realize is that all of these amazing feats that are accomplished in the martial arts are accomplished through the magic of science. And in fact, very particularly, a lot of times the physics and biomechanics. And so I'm just very briefly going to touch on a couple of items of what often impresses people and just let's just glancingly look at some of the science of what's involved in that. One of the big categories of things that that impresses a lot of people is is breaking. You see in martial arts demonstration, people will break all kinds of things. You'll see them break boards like this. You'll see them break ice. You'll see them break cinder block material rocks break all kinds of different things. These things are are in many cases that quite hard these some of these breaks I actually don't want to take too much away from them. A lot of people if you just walked up and tried to do this, you could seriously mess yourself up in the process. That said, these are demonstrations and they are demonstrations, which means that some of the actual skill and strength involved that people do hone in the course of the martial arts training that they get is used to best effect. It's presented in a way that makes it look as impressive as it possibly could. Hence the example of something like when people are breaking boards. It's not just a random choice. They're not just, you know, ripping a board off the side of a house and then splintering it further with their hands. They're taking something like this. Now this is a standard board. It is a piece of basically 12 inch by 1 inch by 10 inch lumber. It is cut to these specifications actually quite deliberately. Actually, it's strictly speaking, it's a little smaller than that in all of those dimensions. It's not really 1 inch thick. It's actually about three quarters of an inch, maybe about 2 centimeters thick. And you like to have it as thin as it can if you want to have it impressive. It's also makes a difference that it is, you know, that it is pine and that it is basically a dry piece of pine that it is in good. You'll notice that it also it does not have any knots in it. All of this is very well calculated because wood is an amazingly sturdy material. But as you all know, wood also consists of cellulose fibers and which means the fibers themselves are very, very strong. But the cement, the sap, the material that holds those fibers next to one another is much, much weaker. So when someone is breaking a board, they're hitting it in such a way that they are breaking it along the grain. Now that even that can actually still be hard depending on the number of boards that are involved. But you are basically, you know, you are breaking it the way it naturally wants to break so that it is as impressive as it can possibly be. Now consider just actually how much force has to be involved in this. I mean, you could still say, well, still, you know, even given that, you know, hand soft board hard, but, but this is where we start to get into actually some of the other kinds of physics involved. And the important thing to remember with with something like breaking is what is the key is how much power is actually delivered to the board. And what matters there is actually the physical property of what's of what's called impulse, which is basically the change in momentum, how much as a hand is passing through the board, how much the hand, its momentum changes because that reflects how much power is being delivered into it. And basically, that basically that's a reflection of how heavy the striking thing is, for example, a fist or a forearm or whatever else, how fast it's moving and then how thick the object is, how far it's moving down through all of that. And you can do sort of the simple calculations. This basically sets the, that in fact, if you take a fist, which weighs, you know, and sort of a fist and forearm, which together weigh about two kilograms. And if you drive it down through a board like this, and it's, you start off moving at about 10 meters a second, which is probably a little fast, but it's good enough for these calculations, two centimeter thick board. It generally can actually have a level of distortion that can bend about one centimeter. So it's about three. Basically, that sets up that that translates out to roughly 10 to the fourth Newtons, or something on the order of a ton of force, is a ton of weight. Well, if a ton of weight was suddenly going to be balanced on this, and bear in mind, it's coming down over just the tiny few square inches of the fist that's actually making contact, you bet that board's going to break. Science says that's going to do that. Now, is it probably the right moment for all of you to get that Mr. Miyagi moment like out of your hand and saying, board does not hit back. And because you say, yes, what about actual striking? What about actual fighting? And you know, that's the fist. I mean, you see people delivering very, very hard punches. And how do they manage to actually do that? It's actually sort of an intriguing study that came up with this just at the end of last year, that was published by Morgan and Carrier. Oh, sorry, I'll do this very, very quickly. The key thing is these two scientists at the University of Utah decided to study the human fist and as part of the idea that maybe people actually sort of evolved to be able to fight more effectively. Now, we can maybe we'll get a chance to talk about whether or not that's really a credible hypothesis. But here's the interesting thing about the human fist. I don't know if you're aware of this. In the entire animal kingdom, we're the only ones that can make a fist like this. We're very unusual because chimpanzees and gorillas, other primates, a curious thing is that because of the proportions of their hands, they cannot make a fist like this. They can fold over their fingers, but they can't fold over their fingers and put the fingertips down into the palm the way that we can. Johnny's saying it's good for climbing, not for punching. Good for climbing, not for punching. Right. Which is part of what they actually then sort of established. They have strong prehensile grips and they don't have a good precision grip. They also don't have is the same kind of punching fist that we have, which is they can't fold their fingers over like this. They can't also buttress the thumb against the fingers in this way. So what these researchers decided to do was they decided to study the effect of different shapes of fists to get a sense of whether or not this would have mattered. They had 12 martial artists hit various things and they monitored the forces and they had people use a proper fist like this. They had ones that would be sort of more a little bit of a fist that's kind of a hybrid between what a chimpanzee could hit with and what we could hit with, where at least the fingers were doubled into the fingers, doubled into the palm and then this kind of bad fist where it's just folded over like this. And what they discovered is that basically if you hit like this, please don't hit like this because, well, you will hurt your hand. You want to hit something more like this with the true proper fist such that these carpal bones of your hand are lining up here with the other long bones of your arm and you want to be able to have a straight striking surface, what Japanese would call seiken. And here's the thing that was interesting about what they study. They determined that being able to fold your fingertips into the palm of your hand doubles the stability of this knuckle joint and buttressing thumb against it doubles that again. So by being able to do this, you are able to make your fist a much sturdier, much more stable, solid thing with which to hit someone else, which means that when you do something like try to hit a board or an opponent, you can hit it much, much harder without risking breaking your hand, at least because these will be as well supported as they are. We'll maybe have a chance to sort of discuss whether or not the human hand is really ideal for being able to do a lot of that. But with that, let me just sort of open up to the discussion with the rest of the panel on some of those subjects. Two quick questions for you. One, how important is spacing in the amount of things that are broken? And the other one is how important is conditioning before you start doing this sort of stuff? Yeah, absolutely. Very important. Right. We'll do some demonstrations of breaking a little bit, a little bit later. But sometimes when there are like multiple boards, you can put one board right against the next or what you will often see is that people will sometimes put the boards at top of another and they will separate with something that look like little spacers, basically pencils. Having that space hugely makes a difference because it then means that you are not doubling up the force that you need to be able to have to go through those boards with every single time. You actually don't have to double it up even when you just use two boards over one, but you really don't have to double it up because when you have this separation. And that's because you actually then have the value of the descending broken piece of wood to help hit the next piece of wood down underneath it. So that actually hugely increases it. And so the picture that I showed there where somebody was breaking, I think like eight boards, there were set spacers in there, which made it really easy for him to just chop right through it. And you do want to have some level of conditioning at least at the level of being able to to make sure that they are doing something with the right kind of technique. I mean the fact is it would probably be really easy to take almost anyone with just a little bit of coaching have them break a single good clean board very very quickly, but you do want to make sure that they're just hitting it exactly the right way so that they don't risk hurting their arms. That's right, yeah, that's kind of thing. Yep, very important with that. Here's a son. I was going to make one point was that there is a sense in physics where boards do hit back. Yes. Which is this equal, this equal and opposite reaction thing. And I think of this all the time because anyone who's ever seen someone screw up a flying sidekick against a much larger opponent what happens is them is the you know the energy that they're trying to transfer to their opponent actually ends up reflecting back this equal opposite reaction and they bounce off. We actually tried to do this once I saw in my episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and went down to my dojo and said we got to try this. I want to see if this works and we found that all my friend had to do was simply just do this and that's all it took to change the equations that I would bounce off. So generally you don't want to do a double-flying sidekick I think is a lesson. Yeah, I very early on in things I was involved in in a demonstration and I had like two boards that were doubled up and I you know slammed into it and my hand bounced off of it like a ping-pong ball at which point my instructor looked at over and said oh yeah yeah that's a great big knot in that one yeah you didn't you didn't want to hit that board at all. Yes the boards do hit back action and reaction. Okay great why don't we move along then. Let's advance the next slide. Round two David take us away. All right well I'm sure a lot of you have no idea who I am and why I'm up here so real quickly my bona fides as far as traditional martial arts go practice for many years and this image here should show you how my stance work skill got. I'll leave that to all the skeptics in the audience to figure out how that was done but I was holding that posture we'll just leave that at that. Also I'm one of those traditionalists who actually believes that you need some fighting in your martial arts to be any good at it and there's proof of that. I have a picture like that on my Facebook page in fact. We actually used to do these a lot when I was younger it's tapered off a little now that I'm middle-aged and have children but they were smokers or what we call tequila sparring nights and if you think that was a one-time thing my girlfriend at the time look at her face you can tell I came home like that a lot. Anyway that's enough of that introduction what I've decided to do for you folks get this right is come up with something dressed up in the martial numerology and mystical terminology that that you could still identify with the skeptics so when we're looking at who in traditional martial arts the first thing I have for you is the five martial fallacies okay fallacy number one the wooden dummy this can be a straw man or a non sequitur depending on how you look at it but basically what it is is the idea that if you only punch and kick air or if you only tangle with wooden people then you're only qualified to punch and kick air or tangle with wooden people any martial art traditional or otherwise should have some component of hands-on with another human being so if you're shopping for martial art you walk into traditional school and you notice no one ever touches anyone else they just wave their arms and stuff in the air you might want to look elsewhere if you're concerned at all with learning how to fight or defend yourself. Number two ancient Chinese secret anybody guess what that would be argument from antiquity you see the game I'm playing here now don't you so virtually every style as traditional as it is was either created or codified within the last 200 years or so some styles have roots that go back further but the versions that you see now are not ancient okay and this is a good thing because people a thousand years ago dealt with different political climates different social situations in very different worlds than we deal with in the modern age and styles that were codified in you know the 19th and 20th century are actually going to speak to us more because those times are more similar to what we deal with so any school that's going to be relying on great-grandmaster Jong or whatever from a thousand years ago did or said so and so don't worry about that so much that's apocryphal and it has nothing to do with they're going to teach you today number three just to keep it at a gallop the golden carp any guesses red herring okay basically the golden carp in martial arts fallacies is lineages titles belts fancy Chinese wall hanging diplomas patches you name it all this stuff in and of itself has very little to do with whether what's going on is any good or not now I'm not saying that there aren't some very hard one black belts you look at something like Brazilian jiu-jitsu nowadays it takes eight ten years to earn a black belt if you're really going at it hard and you know so there are some systems that are very serious about doling these things out there are other systems though that if you punch the clock and pay the fees you will have your black belt in two years that black belt is not worth the belt it's printed on okay so always be on the lookout for that I have to move my head away from the microphone because I can't read this close anymore okay number four no true ninja this is the no true Scotsman after a fashion basically this is something you'll see people use to cover for inadequate inadequacies or missing parts of the systems they teach now before I say this let me say that no system teaches everything nor should they try to specialization is a good thing but if you say hey Mr. Taiji guy why don't we ever see any sparring in class well no true Taiji man would lure himself to that sort of brutality you might want to get a little suspicious you know hey karate guy why don't you ever do any competitions well you know a true karate man is too deadly for the ring yeah I don't think so so watch out because these are things I hear people say all the time oh we don't do this this art's too deadly yeah again if you're only punching and kicking air how do you even know so that's the no true ninja all right number five and this is the one that's the biggest minefield for skeptics if you're training around traditionalists and I'm still a traditional martial artist so I'm not trying to scare you away from it but this one I call once upon a time in China this is basically the naturalistic fallacy and it has so permeated traditional martial arts that you know back in the day air was medicine and food made you live 200 years and you know skills were astounding everyone was in harmony with nature and everything was perfect and idyllic no sorry I mean anybody and I'm sure most the people in this room have actually taken a look at actual history and have realized that no you know a couple hundred years ago the average lifespan in China was something around 40 years old times were tough back then and we're all way better off and way softer than those people were so but the where this really gets insidious is that type of thinking spreads out from there into all these other things in popular culture so I can't tell you how many people have told me my kung fu is fake because I don't believe Chopra physics seriously what does that have to even do with it no you know kung fu guy you gotta believe this stuff I've gotten in huge arguments with people about GMO you know you wouldn't expect this to come up in a martial arts class right but you know if you let your skeptic out of the bag this fallacy has just so permeated that culture you really do have to be careful and I'm not saying throw a bushel basket over your light I'm just saying know what you're getting into because there are a lot and of course acupuncture, qigong, all of this other stuff, Reiki, yeah yeah traditional Chinese medicine, a huge part of it and believe me I've burned a lot of bridges in my kung fu community but that's okay and now before I let this go I do want to throw out three cautions for a skeptic who might be going into martial arts one do not toss out the Buddha with the bathwater okay that would be the genetic fallacy or the fallacy fallacy pre-scientific paradigms often do the right thing just with a bad explanation I mean these people who invented these systems back in the day we're trying to get an edge and they were trying anything and everything and some of it worked but without the advantage of modern science they had to come up with something else to explain it and a lot of schools cling to these explanations even though we have better ones now but that doesn't mean what they're doing is BS so you know if you're in a Chinese martial arts class for let's say just do a little translating in your head when they say root you think oh I need to lower my center of gravity when they say when they say mu chi to the Don Tian you say I need to be aware of my center of gravity you know all these things are actually practical they just have the festoonery of ancient wisdom number two refrain from saying that shit would never work in the ring okay even if it wouldn't okay there's all kinds of martial arts out there look Brett you're a MMA guy and damn good at it so let me ask you a question how much of your valuable training time do you devote to putting a good hard push on somebody right so that's because it's two guys in a ring under a rule set and there's no reason to push each other around you just make them angry right come back here you know he bounced off the cage and kick you in the head right but you know if you think pushes are completely and effective I feel like Archie bunker here then you've obviously never pushed anybody out of window little girl or into traffic you know if you're in a martial art that wants to create confusion in a group of ambushers and allow you time to do some Nike food and get out of there then pushing people into other people is actually a good strategy and in the traditional art that I teach we spend a significant amount of time setting that up but would it work in the ring no no it wouldn't so and the other thing to look at here is actual self-defense is rare for the average person and most of us are never going to be high level sport competitors either so if you're doing any kind of decent martial art at all you're getting huge self-defense benefits right martial arts is a great exercise for it fits well with modern medical knowledge you know intermittent burst of intense activity whether it's rounds or doing forms all this stuff is really good for you the other thing is just by gaining self-confidence and a little fitness and alertness you take yourself way down the scale of potential targets when you're out on the street the more you do martial arts the less people will mess with you because most predatory violence is looking for an easy mark right and if you seem alert and fit then people will leave you alone so that's about all I have to say on that one the last one and I'll do this quickly is don't poison the sake that's poisoning the well don't automatically assume that a traditionalist should necessarily look like you know an MMA fighter in his prime it's the fat Chinese cook that busts out the foo on you right that that stereotype is actually kind of true there are a lot of people that do this intensely they get older they get middle-aged they spread a little like me they still can be really good teachers so and also don't let a little bit of the wool around the edges throw you off decide for yourself what you're looking for out of a martial art going with clear goals and it'll be playing pretty quickly whether that person can help you with those goals or not thanks guys guys before we move on to the next round I wanted to go back to your first fallacy the wood the wooden man or wooden dummy yeah the wooden dummy and SF Zegler or Z as we like to call you for shorts we're going to call you Z for the show I was wondering if you had particular comment on that because I understand that you've been training people using a series of videos or over the internet effectively in which these the students have been doing just that they have not been practicing in full contact with with another person did you did you want to elaborate on that at all yeah you know and today to this day is an end of an experiment that has been going on for one year about about one and a half years I have been teaching a student I live in Hawaii and I've been teaching a student from Austin Texas for about a year and a half and today I got to find out if it worked and didn't work Johnny did it work yeah it worked it worked it's really amazing you know so distance instruction that's all I'm saying well look let me let me be clear about that first point I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do forums and learn structure and body mechanics or it's not a bad thing to do push hands and learn proprioceptive you know skills all that's good all I'm really saying is that if you pull up if you pull up short of actual contact and that never occurs then there's a problem there may be a problem there may be depending on the style of martial art that may depend on physical contact in order to learn yeah and I actually I would I would say that all those things that you think are insignificant I mean again I mean those little exercises and techniques and I'm going to talk about this a little bit in my presentation for someone like me who was smaller in a heavy contact dojo I actually really had to do those exercises very very carefully because if I'm off even a little it's not going to work I can't muscle my way through it all right okay well why don't we move on to round three and keep things rolling here a breaking board demonstration John I think you're going to take a lead on this please please hold your applause until the to the moment when something actually interesting happens let me just point this out I am not here doing this because I am particularly good at breaking boards or anything else I'm not doing this because I am particularly impressive at this in any way these are not in any sense impressive breaks these are just I'm just demonstrating some of how the someone who is in fact as small and basically worthless as I am is still capable of doing this now because your skeptics I feel I need to do this sir have we ever met before this moment have you please inspect this board for the moment and assure yourself that it is in fact an actual board it is not cut in any way to no notice that's right nothing is hidden inside anyway it is it is a very very straightforward board which I am now just going to you know just going to position this now you'll notice I am looking this I'm sizing it up very carefully to see up which where is the grain because I want to make sure that I'm breaking it you know with the grain and I'm just you know just thinking about this either lots of different ways that people they said can break it they they they can you know they can punch there's the hammer fist sort of technique there's also just sort of a driving hand but you know the thing is if with a good board and with a basic fundamental knowledge of what you're doing about this and if you have a lot of real confidence about this is really it's it's basically fairly easy to be able to do this sort of thing really not not impressive this now let me just point out this remember I mentioned boards with knots in them this again maybe you'll check that out then much so yeah because it's good because it's no it's the same material it's actually it's a length from the same big piece of lumber that was cut it's just this is what happens when you get knots in this and it feels heavier and it's more solid and I assure you it would be much much harder to break that way now let me just just check on other things one of the things see now this and and well again I guess sir have we ever met before this yes two seconds just a moment ago something's wrong okay so if you take a look at this piece of board here yes notice I do have a word so but it is also still is a it is a board like the other one just like the other one in every possible way except no it's not no let me give you that board with the X on it and this other board hold them no no this that's interesting it feels that way actually here's the thing I think this one is actually would technically be a little bit lighter why is it lighter because even though it also is from the same batch of lumber even though it came from the same big board to start with I baked it I stuck it in an oven stuck in an oven low heat for about an hour which gave it time to dry out a bunch more of the moisture and to dry it out which means that although it is looks like a board feels like a board is a board never possible way is a little bit more brittle than the other boards which means that it's also a little bit easier to break which would also be a little harder with one of the other ones sometimes people who are doing big demonstrations with boards and they want to make it look really really impressive because they're bringing the boards themselves it's been known to happen that they will bake them or put them in places where they will dry out a lot and I have actually seen situations where people were setting up holding a board and as they were holding the board for someone it's not in their hands so bear that in mind when you do see somebody who just manages to just go through some extraordinary pile of lumber like that but maybe in some cases there's a little more going on that meets the eye they've talked about the issue so you don't have to break them individually you can also just pile them up together and again you just want to try to make sure that you know they are individually still good and that the grain actually still all lines up appropriately and you know if I put if we put spacers between these is actually easier I actually done with a spacer but I mean you know you even doubling up like this again if you have some experience in confidence with it it's still here all this is gonna go again not so very hard and now in the interest of absolutely pushing my luck too far I'm going to now try to do this these three but again these are really not impressive breaks in any way but it just shows you there's nothing going on here other than just the advantage of the physics I am moving my hand really fast and I am hitting it with things that are relatively hard and relatively stable the boards are designed to give me the best possible leverage and everything else on this try a little slightly different see how this works one so then that happened thank you thank you John we're up to round four Jennifer Whitlett so I spent ten years when I was living in New York City studying what I like to call Brooklyn jujitsu probably less of a traditional very self-defense oriented very heavy contact dojo and when I first got into the martial arts I would go on these rec martial arts discussion boards and there would be all these arguments going on about whether size matters and the big line was all things being equal the bigger stronger person will win you know and I got very very bent out of shape by this you know it's like well I don't think that's true then I actually got more advanced in martial arts and started getting hit and sit on and tossed around the room and I thought yeah you know what size matters and and of course I also was writing about physics and this is when I got interested in like some of the science behind martial arts I'm not going to go in deeply into the technical physics if you're interested in that my book the physics of the buffy verse has an entire chapter on the physics of the fight using examples from Buffy the vampire slayer Buffy is a tiny tiny little girl and she like beats up larger opponents all the time how does she do this if size matters the answer is she has superpowers what if you what if you are like me and you don't have superpowers well you know you you have to first of all accept the reality of physics and one of the big realities of physics is size matters mass is an important huge part of the equation one of the first things I did when I started getting serious about Fujitsu was bulk up I was roughly 30 35 pounds heavier than I am now most of that was just solid muscle I could like lay press 600 pounds I mean I was frightening but I needed it be you know just because I was going toe-to-toe against these 200 220 pound guys all the time and you know I learned little tricks I learned that if they were much bigger and out of shape rather than go toe-to-toe I just make them run around till they retired and then move in for a joke so the point is that I like to say is yes size matters but it's not the whole story and in particular certain physics principles most of the martial arts are based on these because among other things it's a way that a smaller person can gain the upper hand by say using your opponent's momentum against them we were talking about some of the different ways you talked about how when you're breaking the board the board is in a way to give you the utmost leverage and there are ways that you can use your weight even if you don't have a lot of body mass you know first of all it's important the center is very very important you know your hip abdominal region that's that's roughly one-third of your body weight so a solid fighting stance you know is very important and almost everything you do in the martial arts comes from that center if you have trained it on the martial arts you know that there are little techniques like snapping the hips like stepping forward while punching this is basically a way to get some momentum to add to your mass in order to have generate a little bit more force you can use the spring principle you can bend down and coil your knees and spring up and then you say with an upper elbow strike and you can do what he did when he broke the board he lifted his weight and he brought his elbow down on the board to break it when he was breaking three again this is a way of using his weight in a way that is useful earlier we were talking that he was telling the story of a technique that was popular in the UFC where a guy would bounce off the cage into a spinning kick and knock out his opponent Buffy actually did that in one of the episodes she jumped on to a table to get some height in order to give herself some leverage so these are all ways in which a smaller person can do well against an opponent or at least gain the upper hand my saying is you know yes size matters all things being equal but it's important to remember that all things are never equal it's kind of a spherical cow scenario you know if any of you know that reference in physics you know there's what works in the lab under very carefully controlled conditions and then there's the fact that when you're out in the real world or in the ring and you've got another person there people are very unpredictable situations a lot of confounding factors invariably the fight goes to the person who gets the upper hand first or the first person to make a mistake and I hope that maybe Brett can talk a little bit more about that so I learned a lot by doing this but I also learned that even with all these wonderful techniques there does come to be a point where you just don't have the mass you are going to hit that limit and it's important to recognize that it does not mean that you cannot excel at the martial arts it does not mean that you should never try I spent a lot of time getting beaten falling down getting overwhelmed but what I found was if I worked really really hard on the fine things to get my technique down every now and then I get it exactly right the first time this happened I was grappling with this much bigger like 220 pound dude and he was basically sitting on me which is all he really had to do was sit on me and just wait out for the wait out the clock but somehow I managed to get some leverage in there and all of a sudden he just went flying off me and we were both so shocked by this that we forgot to continue the fight it was my first indication that leverage actually is very very important one of the things that I learned about hip throws is it's a basic lever in fulcrum principle and I'm going to demonstrate it later on where you're used you're basically creating using your body to create the fulcrum and the other person's body becomes the lever and it's an essential physics principle that all you need to do is apply a little bit of torque and they go right over and it is something that allows me to even just stand there and balance a much heavier person on my back if they also happen to be giving me forward momentum say if they're coming at me at a run or if they're swinging forward and stepping forward into a punch they're going to go over like that so yeah let's go through here so that's what I'm probably going to be talking a little bit about is how to use these physics can give you the understanding of physics principles does give you a superpower of sorts it's not magic it's entirely in keeping with skeptics it's skepticism it's how the world works but it can give you an important edge I think trouble arises when when you know you have person who is much bigger and stronger and is also equally trained I any of you who have watched earlier ultimate fighting championships they did not have weight classes but most professional fighters now do have weight classes because when you've got people of equal skill then size really does matter you just cannot escape that so I think there's one myth that I think we can bust here that's clear it's that one does not mean that you give up it does not mean that a smaller person can't defend themselves against a larger one using martial arts but you do need to recognize that you know mass respected respected a lot so a discussion from the other people here yeah no I mean there's so many great points in there all I mean I think certainly just a point that there a lot of what you said I think comes back to something you certainly you hear good people in martial arts actually give at least good lip service to which is that that there is there is no one sort of ultimate art there is no one secret there is no one thing that's going to work that's going to work in all situations for all people I mean really it depends on who you are and how you train and what the situation is going to be and there's a huge range of situations in there in which you apply there's a it was great there was a I think if you go into training in martial arts it is really good to have a sense of what you want to get out of it because not everybody goes into it wanting to get out different things and there was a there was a thought was a great quote that I had seen was actually in an interview with Jet Lee that had to be like I don't know 25 30 years ago at this point and he was talking about that they're asking him you know sort of the usual question of oh you're so fantastic you know if you were in a fight with you know Steven Segal or you know somebody else would you know who would win and and he was very smart about he said listen in the modern day in the modern era there are really only four reasons why anybody should study me studying the martial arts you do it for your your health and fitness you can do it because you want to be a professional in the martial arts and you'd like to compete in tournaments and you'd like to teach you can do it because you actually are a serious fighter and whether you're fighting professionally or because you are you know you're a soldier and you need to fight seriously you do it for that reason or you're an actor I'm an actor every one of those trains properly to a different end though I would agree that I think that in order to get sort of like the best spectrum of things it is always good for have a certain level of the the rubber meets the road part of things of you you got to get dirty and hit somebody every once in a while and get hit but there's an enormous amount that can come out of that even if it's not the center of what you're training if you're not used to being hit the first time you get punched is quite a shock and you know the first time you take that really hard fall and get the you don't quite do the break fall right you get the wind knocked out of you it's a shock and you know that that actually happened to me where I just someone like threw me extra hard and I landed flat on my back and just you could hear you know when you land hard enough and the wind gets knocked out you can actually hear a crack you know people are convinced they're just like oh my god we broke her yeah but apparently the first thing I said was nice throw anyway oh yeah you're one of us but it's important to feel that because then if you're in a self-defense situation and God forbid someone strikes you you're you know you're not going to get stunned by it because it can be stunning you can just they go oh my god I it takes your brought your body a moment to process so when you're used to getting hit you actually are able to react a little bit faster Jennifer before we move on to a demonstration of what we're talking about right now I wanted to get your opinion on something because I've heard it said you know martial arts is a is something that appeals to males you know rather than females who perhaps look at it as more of a outlet of violence rather rather than rather than something else what's been your experience in that regard what is can you elaborate you know I there's a little bit of something to that but I think it is more culturally based than anything I certainly was one of the only women in my dojo but that was starting to change by the time I was only the second person in women in my style to get a black belt because the final black belt test was just so brutal it was two and a half hours of just getting the crap eaten out of you you know and invariably you break something on your black belt test and they don't stop the test unless you're gushing yeah so and you just keep going I mean I had a fractured elbow you know three-quarters of the way through and you just keep fighting and they ice it in between rounds but and it's hard to watch it's hard to get through but it's also very so I think it chases away a lot of women who maybe don't want that sort of thing but I'm particular I was in a Brooklyn dojo there was there was there were some cultural aspects there to be a woman in that particular neighborhood was to have the big hair and the big nails and that said that's not going to cut it you cannot have those nails so they were not they were only used to a certain kind of woman and but a lot of those women found that there was an aspect of themselves that they didn't think they were allowed to express and once they saw other women doing it and doing well at it and holding their own we got more and more women and the one of the ways that we did it was to have special Saturday sessions with that just for women so that they could they didn't feel as intimidated kind of break them in easy and then when they were ready they could move and go toe-to-toe with the guys and and not be like cowed by that big macho culture because I mean let's face it there's a little bit of a macho element there and there's plenty of women like me who are fine with that you know I write about physics you know I'm around guys all the time you know I used to male-dominated environments I'm a little bit of a bitch it's okay but any woman I think can benefit from this for me it was a very empowering thing I started walking differently and carrying myself differently and I got harassed less I mean it really made a huge difference and in my confidence level you know one little plug I'd like to throw in while around the subject for traditional martial arts because they take such a beating from the MMA crowd literally and figuratively is that when when the physics is stacked against you we won't teach you how to stick a knife in somebody or hit him with a chair I'm saying anybody else couldn't do that and that's the thing I mean the one thing I was allowed to do in my black belt test that the other guy got the guys were not was I was allowed to bite and I only had to use it once but how many people here at Game of Thrones fans yeah one or two but there's that scene in season one where Braun actually decides to be the champion for Tyrion and like beats and like beats the honorable soldier and the woman says you do not fight with honor he goes no he did you know there's no such thing as a fair fight and one of the most important things I learned was I can cheat you do what you can to survive if need be let's move on round five Jennifer demonstration please alright Evan if I can have you and your wife up absolutely remember I was talking about the hip throw and I'm not going to we're not going to do anything particularly impressive here what I want to basically demonstrate is the fundamental lever in principle folk room and I also want to demonstrate why all things are never equal because here we have these two lovely people but their centers of mass trust me we practiced earlier their centers of mass are completely different so I would need to use different techniques and adjust my body accordingly to throw either one of these so I'm going to use Evan first and when we practice this in the dojo we're going to practice this we're going to be facing each other this is basically to teach the principle I'm basically going to get him break his balance forward if this was an actual technique he'd be stepping forward into a swing and I would be stepping in and I would use his momentum against him and then he would ideally go fly but the actual focus principle I don't actually even need that I can just come in I notice I'm going to turn in I'm going to up chuck him here he's heavier than I am I can kind of hold him here indefinitely because I've got my feet are serving as the as the fulcrum he's the lever and then I'm going to apply a torque I've got my arm around his head here all I really need to do at this point is I'm going to turn I'm going to look away he's going to land right in front of me and from here I've got him there's arm bars there's chokes there's all kinds of things I could even just kneel on his head and he can't get up so it's a very very basic throw when it's done full speed it's very impressive I have not trained practically you know for like five or six years so I'm not going to attempt it on someone I just met but I want to show what happens when I try and throw the fellow Jennifer this has nothing to do by the way with our relative masses but look at the difference in height and where my center of mass falls and where her center of mass falls I need to get much lower on her and that's going to be hard on me so this is really so and this is an important thing this is why this is why all things are never equal I'm going to come in and look this isn't going to work this is where I was for Ethan I need to get down here and then I need to check her up and throw her over it's actually much much harder probably not the best technique to use on someone with a lower center of mass what I'm more likely to do you know because this is going to happen it happens all the time it happens sometimes even on a test you're supposed to do this really fancy hip throw you don't quite get in deep enough your techniques a little off we have a little way of getting around that I'm going to come in and I just I don't have her I'm going to put this back and I'm just going to pop this up and she's going to go over to the side it's called a drop throw sorry it's a little harder fall you all right I should have warned I was going to do that so I've been known to just bring random people up from the audience do this you won't do that here unless there's someone who really wants to try it anyone can we have you back Evan yes no no you're no you're going to throw him I'm not going to throw you do you do martial arts oh well that goes it down no the idea was that I would get like these young girls or these young children who have never thrown somebody in there what it's all right we'll skip that part we get we get the point I think you've been I definitely have made yeah I think the look on their faces when they realize that this stuff works you know is wonderful because it really is about leverage more than anything else and being able to and the more you train the better able you are to basically use your bought your opponent's weight and momentum against him and that's how it works excellent Jennifer thank you very much nice round of applause to for my wife Jennifer Bernstein she puts up with a lot believe me she's a great ookey I like her I was thrown by Jennifer will that I mean that's just one of the highlights of my skeptic career I'm telling you wonderful around six Brent weedman take it away hi guys I gotta tell you this this this workshop here has made me kind of nervous which for somebody who fights on television in his underwear is kind of a feat it's I am I'm impressed and intimidated by the company that I hold both up here and in the crowd all the minds in this room that have not been mushed up and bruised we're scared of you yeah well so I'm familiar with the the impression that most of you have of my sport of mixed martial arts and it's largely not a very positive one and sometimes deservingly I mean we're all familiar with the the cage fighting t-shirt bro that somehow finds his way into every bar club and restaurant in the country and these things it's very it's marketed very aggressively and so it has kind of a bad taste in some people's mouths however I'm here today to maybe change your mind a little bit I'd like to talk about MMA is an example of the scientific method in action and submit to you that it's actually improved evidence-based thinking at least in in as it relates to the martial arts throughout history like we've talked about the martial arts have been very secretive they've been shrouded in mystery and they've been many times closely guarded secrets passed down from from master to pupil or student to I mean teacher to a small group of students and it's so often the case with mystery comes legend comes folklore comes rumor and so it's hard to pin down a date when this really started to change but I think we see in the last hundred and fifty years or so a lot more challenge matches becoming the sort of experimentation of martial arts there's there's a lot of different examples of this the one that maybe most of us are familiar with are the Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighters from South America namely the Gracie family I think is something that we've all heard the Gracie brothers famously took out a newspaper ad if you want a broken arm call this number and you know I'm not here to talk to you know whether that was right or wrong but it was effective they got lots of lots of challenge matches with lots of traditional martial artists lots of very dogmatic fighters and they got to practice or you know test what it is that they were practicing in the dojo and adjust the techniques accordingly you also see this with the catch wrestlers from Great Britain you also see this you know we've been talking a lot about the traditional martial arts versus the the modern martial arts or MMA or whatever and this this concept is not unique to MMA Masayama was a karate master who made a whole new realm of martial arts a whole new realm of karate that was full contact karate bringing out the challenge matches talking to people that said if I touch you here it would kill you and then you have a guy coming up like Masayama who essentially says okay well you touch me and I'll kick you and we'll see what happens and so throughout this experimentation like happens so often these results yield a change in methodology and this has really been pervasive throughout the martial arts culture I lost my place here excuse me yeah so the big thing that we see I think that that is maybe surprising to some people is often called the judo paradox Jigaro Kano was the founder of judo he founded about 160 years ago now and judo came from traditional Japanese jiu-jitsu traditional Japanese jiu-jitsu focused a lot on very dangerous very deadly techniques eye gouges throat grabbing and all sorts of all sorts of things that you cannot practice with your friends and Jigaro Kano had a very interesting idea and I would make a personal point to say maybe one of the greatest ideas in the history of martial arts which is well let's take out these dangerous deadly techniques let's either de-emphasize them or completely remove them all together and then let's take this new safer I'm going to put that in parentheses this new safer art and let's practice it full speed we've already touched on it a little bit today with the the the wooden dummy argument you know if you punch and kick air that's about what you're qualified to fight is air what started to happen was these these now less deadly so-called arts were having greater success in their challenge matches against the more deadly traditional martial arts why because when we compete against each other at a full speed under with full effort and most importantly under the stress that comes with a combative interaction it's no longer a surprise to you when it happens that's real I had an instructor tell me when I was very very young and made a huge impression of me that everything that you do in the dojo is a theory is a hypothesis rather it's all just an idea until somebody is trying to do it to you and now that's real and so what when we made the martial arts safer they actually became more effective this year the emphasis at Tam seems to be a sort of a call of act a call to action you know looking at the intersection between our sort of heady ideas and some actual real cultural changes and so I'd like to submit to you that there's been three major cultural changes as a direct result of this type of thinking in the martial arts the first one is the most obvious and it's that mixed martial arts went from being a side show a freak show to being a mainstream sport internationally it's very very well-known it's the fact that you often hear called the fastest growing sport in in America and indeed in the world and that really is fueling this progression like we talked about before the good martial artists are changing their techniques as new ideas come to light as you learn that old techniques aren't working quite so much or maybe somebody's caught on to them and there's a better way it's also not always as straightforward as one technique is right and one technique is wrong or one's good and one's bad it's what's the best way for you what's a better way for me to do something also the way for me to do something is going to be a little different maybe than the way Jennifer does it a lot of things play into that we've already talked about body size and we've talked about you know the way that you train the way that you see yourself as a fighter obviously a striking primary striker is going to train differently and fight differently than a grappler is going to so that's important the second cultural shift we've seen is in the culture of the martial arts gym I'm not very old but even 20 years ago when I was very young it wasn't uncommon everywhere that you'd go in the United States to see a traditional martial arts school on every corner it was very very big you think of we think of the the martial arts movies that were very popular in the 80s that I was obsessed with and also unlike the wrestling side of things the sports side you saw things like wrestling and boxing at the lower level start to lose numbers I'm not gonna you know obviously wrestling was in the Olympics and professional boxing is a large sport but at the entry level you know high school kids wrestling high school kids and boxing programs you the numbers were not very good a lot of wrestling programs dried up and died today it's almost the exact opposite there's been a sort of widening of the gap now you go to every major city and there is a half dozen MMA gyms alone not to mention the standalone Brazilian jiu-jitsu the standalone kickboxing and boxing there's been an enormous resurgence in wrestling even in my lifetime in Kentucky wrestling was almost where I'm from by the way is almost non-existent 15 20 years ago and now more and more programs are popping up all across the state my high school has a wrestling program is recently is five or ten years after I grew about five years after I graduated it still did not so this is a change that we're seeing and I think that ties into the third change that we see and that's that the average the lay person the average person on the street now has a more realistic expectation of combat it's becoming much more difficult for an instructor to dupe a student with mystical moves and and aligning their chakras and focusing your cheat and the no-touch knockout and all of this stuff you show this to the average sixteen-year-old male in America now and by the way the average sixteen-year-old American male is an MMA fan anymore and they're going to look at it and whether or not they've ever trained today in their life they're going to go something's not right here something's not right that doesn't add up to me I don't think that seems very realistic spinning triple back flip kicks they're going to look at them say I I don't think so and any time that we see an increase in critical thinking and skepticism in society I think we should all consider that a small victory I said at the beginning of my talk that I was a little intimidated being here you know everybody I meet it's doctor lawyer scientist author doctor lawyer scientist author and here I am the jock right it's like high school all over again but you know I I had an epiphany last night and that's that all of us are here today because of the magician I think it takes all kinds and my hope is an instructor is that I can talk to you know younger guys I have a lot of adolescents a lot of teenagers that deal with that I deal with that train with me also a lot of adults but I would like to think that this critical eye that I'm teaching them it's easy for me to teach them because fighting somebody is cool choking another guy is cool so when I can teach 15 year old kid how to be critical how to approach this with a skeptical eye and with a with a mind for reality not what not what he wants reality to be but what reality really is on the mat what the truth is on the map that's going to trickle through in his life I hope that's going to show up in other places of his life and if it's not a stretch to say because I'm a living proof of this that the martial arts can become the framework of somebody's life I started training I've been told roughly a week or two after I had walking down my father was a martial artist I started formal lessons at the age of three at the age of five my father opened a school the rest is history I can't relate to statements like well I haven't trained in a few years and things like that like most martial artists do because I trained yesterday and I'm going to train later today probably and I'm likely trained tomorrow this is just part of my life and so the gift that I hope that I'm giving to some of these especially these younger people is that this can start this critical thinking can start to plug its way into the rest of their world view and so I would actually like to ask that maybe you guys give MMA a chance a little bit you know in a room full of intelligent people the odds are you're not going to find a receptive crowd to extreme cage fighting well yeah three but already but hopefully you guys can see that that the MMA in my mind the way I see it is really just a grand experiment it's a big beautiful violent experiment and what we're teaching is not how to fight but how to think and I think that that's an important thing and I hope if you are considering studying some martial arts I could care less if it's with me if it's with my style or whatever but I would encourage you to check that out and to not not worry about how does my skepticism plug into my desire to learn some martial arts especially if you want to go the traditional route I want you to take that skeptical mind to the martial arts and use it to hone that eye that you that you guys already have because you're here thank you so much excellent thank you we've got about 18 minutes left in this workshop so I think we're going to just move along to the next round Z you're going to be talking about defining martial arts for us all yes thank you you know it seems as if the big problem with martial arts is really the definition how we all define what martial arts is I think we've heard a lot of different versions especially entertainment sport fitness health and fitness self-defense there's a lot of crossover often in these and so our definitions tend to be pretty wishy-washy I mean really if you look at the term martial arts bullshit I'm gonna call it Marshall means war and arts means like skill so are any of us practicing war skills are we really I don't think so I really 400 years ago the flintlock gun was invented and it pretty much sort of changed the way we fight so you know I would be amiss if I were to come up here and didn't say this my see my seafood sees this I'd really gain earful if I didn't say this I'm gonna say this all of your guys martial arts suck all right with that said I I started training when I was four years old I'm 50 years old now I love all the martial arts and I I'm just very fortunate not just in martial arts but in my life I've been very fortunate with my instructors I had Randy as my as my mentor as I was growing up I had a guy that trained alongside with Bruce Lee train me in martial arts I'll stop there but you know the defining and I think as skeptics we need to really get wordy you know we really need to you know kind of define these terms that we're using and not just sort of assume so I'm going to assume martial arts we're not thinking war skills we're thinking in general correct me if I'm wrong health developing health fitness and the second part is developing a self-defense now if that's the real definition that we're all kind of gone under who would agree with that self-defense fitness pretty much okay okay so I've made a safe assumption if that's the definition then we still got a lot of work to do here because for instance you have jujitsu which I don't know how many are somewhat familiar if you watch MMA you probably know what the guard is now as a self defense person the guard is frightening to me I as a jujitsu player I use the guard extensively but in real life the guard is a very dangerous thing and as a mixed martial artists it's competition the realm of competition is extremely different from the realm of real street fighting and you had mentioned something regarding the the sport fighters were winning over the self-defense fighters well my first question is were the self-defense fighters allowed to kill the sport fighters because if not then they're going to lose that competition so there's a lot going on the muk-jum actually am I starting to jump around yes I am so defining what we're talking about is really important I strain in a martial art called Wing Chun it was Bruce Lee's first martial art and it was invented by a woman to me the concepts of Wing Chun come the closest to fulfilling the definition of martial arts because it's a martial art that was invented by a woman to beat up a man a smaller woman beating up a bigger man that is what the martial arts says it does that's its claim if it doesn't do it it's bullshit and so for instance jujitsu I share your pain I love jujitsu I can't stand it one a bigger guy won't play with me and will just crush me it's it's just a drag I gotta go to the hospital yeah I gotta get surgeries done it is very expensive you know and here's another element I'm gonna try not to bird hop jump around because I'm world famous for that see that yeah I'm gonna go back to just detail Wing Chun you say what is Wing Chun and in a word what is Wing Chun detail Wing Chun is detail we have a form it's pretty much the main thing that we do little form and it's called Sinum Tao and Sinum Tao means little mind fist that still doesn't make any sense so the translation really means detail so really when you're talking about Wing Chun you're talking about detail really small details and I think that some of the details we really need to get right with here is defining our definitions what are we claiming what's our claim as a mar in each of our martial arts and is our martial art fulfilling that claim I kind of think that I've trained in a lot of martial arts and I've said if I had multiple lifetimes I would train in each and every one of them I had deep respect for all martial arts but my training in martial arts has led me to Wing Chun simply because it allows me to fulfill the definition better than any of the other martial arts that I love so another thing about a martial art I think that's important is that a mark martial art shouldn't create an arms race this is a problem I think it's a huge problem in concept of how we think of martial arts and if you're wondering what I mean by that and if the martial art relies on a technique then all it's going to take is knowledge of that technique and another technique to beat that technique and so what we'll be playing here is a game of who can practice and learn the most techniques now if that's the game you want to play that's fine that's wonderful but let's kind of really understand what's going on here you know 400 you had said something happened in martial arts that what happened happened 400 years ago 400 years ago was significant to martial arts 400 years ago Sir Isaac Newton f equals ma I believe sorry among other things among other things thank you the molecule was discovered about 400 years ago if I'm please correct me if I'm wrong around this age there was the age of specialization and this changed martial arts hugely the flintlock gun you no longer had to train in martial arts you just hand it over the gun point that press done this really changed martial arts and we now became specialists as you were saying jujitsu originally had eye gouges and stuff like that what's not really well known is Wing Chun has grappling it's called Chi Na it was invented well before you know all the the submission grappling arts but we do have that element but I my guess is around 400 years ago or so it was also kind of taken out and we all started specializing or I believe it was Orson Wells again correct me if I'm wrong he said that it was regarding the generalize a the general practitioner versus the specialty guy I don't know the quote exactly but he was saying how these specializations have created somewhat of an imbalance and as a martial artist I really agree with that and it also kind of goes against what some of you have said regarding you know well you can't practice at all well depending on what you're trying to do if you're going to make sport of martial art well then yeah you're going to have to specialize and work within the rules and whatnot if you're going to use martial art as a self defense you really do need to work in all and so now you say well then there we go mixed martial arts well you have to have a base martial art and I'm sure you agree yeah from your base you then discover and reach out and look at what others are doing and see how that relates to what you're doing but I say please as a martial artist unless of course you're a sport martial artists or a fictional practitioner of sorts really try to be a general practitioner and really you know try to do exactly what we say our definition is which is to develop a practical self-defense and a method of sustainable fitness not a kind of fitness that will you gotta go to hospital get this fixed you're going to injure yourself you're going to get kicked in the head a bunch of times you know this stuff it's going to lessen your quality of life and I kind of don't feel as if that's our concept of what we want to do in martial arts well said very good thank you see thank you got one more quick round I would love for each of our panelists to just for a couple seconds give you each a word of wisdom to to sort of part with today and I think we might have a time for one or two questions after we're done here so each will start with John will take a few seconds I mean I think you know it's been great listening to what it's been great listening to what everybody's been saying but really I think in a lot of ways the and I hope I'm not preempting the pearl of wisdom you're going to share on this Jennifer but I think real one of the great things I think that that that you said today was I loved the entire idea that science is your superpower I think that is a great thing for people to be able to understand that the human beings are capable of doing so extraordinarily much when they're well informed about what it's possible by taking advantage of and informing ourselves about about the underlying principles that make the universe work the physics the mechanics of our own body by learning how to take advantage of that it can be personally enriching and it can give us greater grasp of capabilities we would never have imagined we would otherwise have thought we could make possible but it takes a lot of the application I think martial arts is one great route into that but so too is science one thing I want to say really quickly is I think it's great that what we're seeing here is the continual push back and interplay of different forces traditionalism got a little crazy for a while and MMA comes along it pushes it back out into the sunlight and sort of shows the holes in the emperor's clothes but you know what is MMA composed of if not traditional techniques so it really is just one big thing as he was saying I mean it's hard for somebody to specialize in everything under the sun but it's good that all these forces have come together and what I think is great is that you've got people from all different walks that are able to sit at this table and all pushing the same direction to bring more realism reality more thoughtfulness and an improvement in the martial arts and you know I'm just very glad to see that in addition to the science of superpower is this on yes it is okay I think one of the most important things that came out of my martial arts experience was was learning how to fail the very first thing that you learn I in my martial art and I assume in most others and we basically spent three weeks on break falls for they even let me do any kind of technique before they even let me do anything I had to get those break falls down because they basically said you're going to be falling a lot you're going to get a lot you're going to be failing a lot how you respond to that failure determines whether or not you are going to succeed in this martial art and that is actually true of life and it is a lesson that I wish I had learned before the age of 30 it would have saved me a lot of grief I just like to say that there's a there's a common thread that you've heard tonight I mean you see we've got Zee and David coming from a little more of a traditional stance and in their approach to the martial arts and Evan and Jennifer both discussed that that self-defense really was like the main thrust of their martial arts experience and obviously at least in this point in my life the combat sports are the main thrust of my martial arts right now but there's something that you've heard constantly and that's a we're all a little we're all a little weird in that we all like the contact you kept hearing that over and over and over and I think there's a really wonderful quote from a famous stick fighting gym that is applicable here it's it's higher consciousness through harder contact it's something it's something that I've always found true because I had a wonderful conversation last night about the very point where we said that when somebody when a punch is whizzing past your head or when you're struggling with another you know grown man who's trying to choke you there is nothing more real and there's nothing more right now than that moment there's no tomorrow there's no yesterday there's no bills to pay there's no things to worry about there's the guy choking you there's the punch coming at you and you know what are we all obsessed with if not reality and I think finding these moments where we were the martial arts afford this is time to spend time in the now in the right now and to study this moment in its reality not what we want it to be but what it really is I think you can only yield positive things in our lives a good friend of mine Mia Zapata she was murdered a few years ago she was strangled to death a day a day after I talked with her traded massages just a few months ago another woman a good friend of mine was her she was attacked she had her head split open she showed me the pictures you could see her skull from her eye all the way here of a guy that just got on top of her and started beating her with a surround statue and busted she's she's still you know trying to recover from that you know martial arts can save your life and it can save your life in many ways as you were saying you once you learn martial arts you walk different the human animal kingdom sees the way that you're walking and it doesn't register really consciously it's one of those unconscious animal things I you've just been prompted to if you're interested in martial arts don't let the traditionalism or the woof scare you away I'd kind of like to add a little bit to that which is saying go out and start asking if there are any secular martial arts out there is there a secular march because we need a secular martial arts community and I feel that this may be the very seeds of that I'm very honored to be part of that and thank you folks